Blue Jeans Network was
founded in November 2009 with a passion to make video communications easy.
Starting from the ground up, Blue Jeans was built as a cloud-based
conferencing service to enable people to connect with each other any time,
any place and from any device. Every phone call should be a video call and
we are designing the technology to make that happen.

Krish
Ramakrishnan
Co-Founder & CEO

Krish brings more than 20
years of successful leadership and innovation to Blue Jeans Network. A
serial entrepreneur, Krish has been founder and CEO of several successful
startup ventures. Prior to Blue Jeans, he was an Entrepeneur-In-Residence (EIR)
at Accel Partners, where he was exploring HD video technologies including
the current idea behind Blue Jeans. Before that, Krish was the General
Manager for the Server Virtualization business unit at Cisco Systems,
responsible for architecting Cisco's datacenter and desktop virtualization
solutions. Prior to his work at Cisco, Krish was the CEO of Topspin
Communications. Under his stewardship, the company re-invented itself as a
datacenter virtualization player and executed strategic partnerships with
IBM, Dell, HP, and Sun.

Topspin was acquired by
Cisco in 2005. Before joining Topspin, Krish was the vice president and
general manager for the Content Business Unit at Cisco Systems. Under his
leadership, Cisco developed many industry-leading products including the
L4-L7 load balancers, content caches, CDN, and micro-webservers. Krish
joined Cisco in 1995 when his first startup, Internet Junction, was acquired
by them. Earlier in his career, Krish worked for NET, PeerLogic, Bell Labs,
and Perkin-Elmer. He has an MSCS from Monmouth University and a BS (Physics)
from Madras University, India.

CEOCFO:Mr. Ramakrishnan, would
you tell us the concept at Blue Jeans Network?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:The concept of Blue
Jeans Network is actually very simple. We are trying to make all video
devices work with each other. Simply put; video conferencing has been around
for a long time yet it has not been widely adopted because none of the
systems are interoperable like a telephone system would be. Blue Jeans makes
all of the world’s video devices communicate with each other.

CEOCFO:Would you tell us how
you do it?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:As an example, take
someone who uses Skype. If they want to have a video call with someone, that
“someone” has to also be on Skype. In a corporate environment, companies
have invested in expensive room based video conferencing systems. However,
those systems typically only communicate with similar systems within the
company. What Blue Jeans has done is provide a cloud service that works as a
gateway or “translator” between the disparate video platforms that are often
built on proprietary protocols.

CEOCFO:Why has it been so
difficult to put this together or has it even been tried before?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:To my knowledge, no one
has attempted it before. For video conferencing to truly be pervasive there
are a few key inhibitors that need to be overcome and until now, no one has
been able to successfully overcome all of them. First and foremost, there
are a myriad of incompatible video-enabled devices. System incompatibility
does not scale or promote wide spread adoption. As an example, if an iPhone
can only talk to an iPhone it is not going to be popular. Secondly, most
business users shy away from video conferencing because it has been complex
and very difficult to use. The result is they do not use it and instead fall
back to audio conferencing. After all, everyone knows how to dial. The third
obstacle is reach. Typically, video conferencing has been used on dedicated,
private networks. It is rarely operated over the public internet because the
quality can be poor. Reliance on a dedicated network for video conferencing
limits the number of people you can communicate with outside of your
company. You cannot communicate with your business supplier, your partners,
your vendors, and so on. It’s all of these hurdles that have to be overcome
to make video pervasive. Blue Jeans came up with a technology that uses off
the shelf servers to do the core video processing while delivering it at
mass scale. We have focused on the ease of use ensuring people are able to
use video conferencing without extensive training or handholding. Lastly, we
made sure that the video looks and sounds extremely good over the internet.
These three things give us an industry advantage and made customers wantto have it. The usability definitely is a big, big step forward for
the industry.

CEOCFO:How long has this been
available?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:The service was launched
in June of 2011, so we are just shy of 2 years.

CEOCFO:Who is using it today,
generically? Are there particular types and sizes of companies? Where is it
most applicable?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:I will go to a couple of
use cases. When it comes to business customers we see the entire spectrum,
all the way from small and medium businesses to mid sized companies and
large enterprises. We also see huge interest from schools, colleges and
universities who use it; everyone needs video communication. We find
adoption across the board. For example, cutting edge companies like Facebook
and Foursquare use our service, universities like The
Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University uses our service, non-profits, law
firms, financial institutions and some of the world’s most well known brands
use our service. We have quite a range of customers that use Blue Jeans as a
mechanism for their collaboration.

CEOCFO:How do people find out
about Blue Jeans or does everyone know these days?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:I wish everyone knew.
People find out primarily through word of mouth. There is a strong
influential community of video conferencingusers who know
about us. They have been very influential in spreading the word to other IT
professionals. Beyond that, just the demand from business professionals who
no longer want to travel, who want to be able to communicate over video with
their partners, suppliers, or whatever; they are urging the IT professionals
to go and find solutions that work and we are the only real solution that is
out there. Business users are constantly championing our service. It has
become a vital tool in terms of collaboration for them. We often see if
company “A” uses our service to video conference with company “B,” company
“B” then says “this works pretty well, let me also get a subscription.”

CEOCFO:What have you changed
since the product first came out? Are there features that you would like to
add or that you are working on that you can talk about?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:One of the beauties of
cloud service is that you can continually innovate and improve a service by
releasing software without having to ask the end user community to
constantly upgrade their software. This is the power of a cloud or a
“software as a service” business model. We have continually innovated and
added more features since we launched. For example, when we launched the
service we were able to interoperate between Skype and the corporate room
systems. Since then we have added support for Microsoft Lync, which is
hugely popular in the enterprise. We have added support for Google Chat and
various other platforms that come along the way. In addition to that, people
who collaborate on video may want to share their desktop via HD content
sharing. While most recognized for our interoperability, the industry will
start to see us innovate and expand our service to include more robust
collaboration solutions. We've already expanded our collaboration focus to
include an easy way for mobile users to host or join meetings from
smartphones and tablets. Mobile users can also view and share content
easily from our iOS application so they don't miss a beat in the meeting.
We are focused on making sure our platform stays in trend with the needs of
business users while pushing the boundaries of what traditional video
conferencing has been able to do. This will be a strategic direction for us
going forward.

CEOCFO:How is business these
days? It sounds like it is quite robust!

Mr. Ramakrishnan:Yes. Business is going
very well. We are growing very fast. We are hiring sales people like crazy,
because we have so much demand and we are expanding internationally.

CEOCFO:Is it a direct sales
model? Since there are so many targets how do you decide who you should be
targeting?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:We support a hybrid
model. We primarily sell through channels with direct sales assisting our
channel partners in selling the service. We have a partnership with
InterCall in the United States. That is one example. We have a partnership
with Deutsche Telekom in Germany. There are many channel partners and our
direct sales team assists those partners in selling the Blue Jeans
service.

CEOCFO:You have been recognized
with a number of awards. What stands out in the awards area?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:When we are recognized
for the breakthroughs in terms of the innovation that we bring to the video
conferencing industry that is great. The awards that I am very proud of are
the awards that recognize Blue Jeans as a great place to work. We strive to
create an environment where employees can come and not only create great
innovative products, but I want my employees to be happy, creative and
productive. That is what we strive for and any award that recognizes our
workplace excellence is something very meaningful to me.

CEOCFO:Why should investors and
people in the business community pay attention to Blue Jeans Network?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:Blue
Jeans is here to change the way people think about and conduct meetings.
Investors have long been interested in video and web communication solutions
but up until now, customers have been given solutions that required them to
adhere to the process and guidelines of the provider. Blue Jeans changes
that. We give customers who have not been able to get started in video a low
cost, easy way to get started. We also let customers who have invested
millions in video infrastructure leverage their investments and have an
easier, more cost effective solution that gives them flexibility they have
never had. From a market perspective, there is huge opportunity to convert
every audio call into a video call.

CEOCFO:What might people not
understand or miss about Blue Jeans Network that they really should know?

Mr. Ramakrishnan:You always hope people
understand what you do. Whether people know it or not, the one thing that
people should understand about Blue Jeans is that our mission is to make
video conferencing as simple and reliable as audio conferencing. It is as
simple as that. If we can turn every audio call into a video call we have
done our job.

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“For video
conferencing to truly be pervasive there are a few key inhibitors that need
to be overcome and until now, no one has been able to successfully overcome
all of them.”- Krish Ramakrishnan